Music Notes: Wild Flag Played Letterman; Matisyahu Shaves His Beard; D Generation to Record; More

Here are some tidbits of music news from far and wide:

• Wild Flag made its network TV debut last night, playing "Romance" on Letterman (video below).

•  Trent Reznor "feels at home" with "Dragon Tattoo": the L.A. Times looks at how the Nine Inch Nails frontman fit right in writing the music for one of the year's most anticipated movies.

• Hasidic rap/reggae star Matisyahu shaved off his trademark beard and posted a photo of his cleanly shorn face on Twitter. He explained on his website that he is "reclaiming himself" from the many rules he used to follow, and tells his fans to "Get ready for an amazing year filled with music of rebirth." 

•  D Generation to record new music: before Jesse Malin was a solo singer-songwriter, he was in the punk band D Generation, which reformed to play a few gigs recently. Now it seems they are going to record some new tunes in 2012. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

• Rolling Stone's recent issue named its 100 greatest guitarists of all time, but the list was, not surprisingly, short on women. Grrrlbeat.com mentions some of the women axe players that RS forgot.

• Visqueen disbands, but Rachel Flotard plays on: I was sad to hear that the band broke up, but was glad to learn that its leader, Bergen County, NJ native Flotard, is already at work with another project, called Cobirds Unite, with singer-songwriter Rusty Willoughby and others (including Barbara Hunter, Visqueen's cello player).

• Google Music vs. Amazon vs. iTunes: a reporter put the three major cloud music players to the test, telling who came out on top and why.

Music Notes: iTunes Match Goes Live; Google Music Store Coming Wed.

Apple's iMatch cloud service went live this week; look for Google's music store Wednesday.

Cloud-based music services take another step forward this week with advances from both iTunes and Google.

Apple's iTunes went live with its iMatch service, which for $24.99 a year will sync your music library of songs, movies, and other media not purchased from iTunes, placing a high-quality version of songs you own on the company's servers. (If Apple doesn't have a copy of a song, you can simply upload it.) Note: you must have iOS5 and iTunes 10.5.1 to use iMatch.

As Apple notes:

"...iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are, your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren't, iTunes has to upload only what it can't match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality—even if your original copy was of lower quality."

With the other music cloud services, Amazon Cloud Drive/Cloud Player and Google Music Beta, you have to upload songs yourself to the services if you want them to be part of your play-anywhere library.

Google's options may change, because on Nov. 17th the company is set to launch the Google Music Store. It's been working hard behind the scenes to get the major music labels on board so it can legally sell and store music from their artists.

Google is said to have recently reached a licensing deal with Sony, giving it access to most of the big music companies (Universal and EMI [which Universal bought last week], in addition to Sony). Google has not yet inked a deal with Warner Music Group. Google has also reached agreement with Merlin Network, which represents 18,000 musicians on independent labels such as Merge and those of the Beggars Group, according to the L.A. Times.

Google's service will be like that of Amazon and iTunes, CNBC says, and will work with Google Music Beta. But it says Google something the others don't offer: "customers will be able to share songs they've purchased with friends, using Google+. Those friends can listen to a song a few times before they must buy it themselves."

I'll be watching for Google's announcement on Wednesday to see how these and other predictions pan out. Of particular interest to me is that Google will supposedly have access to all that indie music.

Music Notes: Google Music Beta Announced; Groupon & Live Nation to Offer Discount Concert Tickets

Google Music is now in beta, and you can apply to be part of it.

The music landscape continues to shift and change, the last couple of days have seen several big companies jockeying for position.

* Google announced its music streaming service today at the Google I/O conference (a meeting of Google software developers). The service, currently called Google Music beta, is in limited use now, but when it goes live it will be interesting to see how it stacks up against Amazon's cloud player and cloud drive, which the online store launched last month. Ironically Apple, which is the 800-pound gorilla in selling music online, has yet to stake its claim in the streaming/music cloud turf.

The Google music service is similar in some ways to Amazon's cloud player. It will let users stream music and rent movies over their Android devices. According to the L.A. Times, users will be able to upload up to 20,000 songs to their computers and mobile devices. Unlike Amazon, however, users will not be able to buy music from Google's service. Amazon allows customers to buy music and other digital content and immediately store it on their cloud account. Users of Google Music beta will have to manually upload the music they already own to the service.

An interesting note is that Google, like Amazon, does not have licensing deals with the music labels for streaming the content, and decided to proceed without it. This could raise certainly some legal issues. You can sign up for the Google Music beta at music.google.com/about.

The Times article says that at first the Google music service will be available by invitation and only in the U.S., and will be free in beta. It's not clear what charges there may be when the service comes out of beta.

* Groupon and Live Nation are teaming up for discount concert tickets. The group-buying concept of Groupon and LivingSocial has been a huge hit for all kinds of products and services, and now it's coming to concert tickets. The service, called GrouponLive, was rolled out on Monday, and will officially launch in the summer, according to an article in the L.A. Times — just in time for the outdoor concert season. "GrouponLive will sell tickets to Live Nation concerts, as well as for companies that sell tickets for concerts, sports, plays and other events through the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster," the article says.

You can sign up for GrouponLive at www.groupon.com/live.

The live music industry has been clobbered the last few years. While some big-name acts have done well, many others have had to pare back or cancel their tours. Live Nation is no doubt hoping to use discounts to boost sales that have slowed in part due to what's perceived as ticket prices that are too high in a soft economy. There was widespread discounting at outdoor venue shows last summer, with places such as New Jersey's PNC Arts Center offering $40 lawn tickets for $10 for some shows.

Music Notes: Go-Go's & The Cars Playing NYC, Google's Music Cloud, Prince's 21 Nights in L.A., Bob Mould Memoir

Video for "Blue Tip," a song from "Move Like This," the forthcoming album from The Cars.

There's music news from the cutting edge of technology and the punk and new-wave days of the 1980s this week:

* The Go-Go's have rescheduled their reunion tour, which was cancelled last year when guitarist Jane Wiedlin suffered a knee injury while hiking. The Go-Go's and their "Ladies Gone Wild" tour hits New York's Irving Plaza on June 3rd; tickets are available here. Their planned tour last year was billed as a farewell tour, but this one isn't—I'm hoping that means that the band isn't planning on this run of shows to be its last. The tour coincides with the 30th anniversary of their blockbuster debut album, "Beauty and the Beat."

* The Cars on tour: I mentioned a couple of months ago that The Cars were coming out with a new album, "Move Like This," in May, and now they've got some tour dates planned. They're playing New York's Roseland Ballroom on May 25th, and you can look for tickets here.

* Google's cloud music player being tested: Amazon.com launched its cloud media player last week, and apparently Google's entry into the market is undergoing testing by the company's employees. Although Amazon's service seems to have run afoul of the music companies by not getting licensing rights, CNet wrote a few weeks ago that Google is in negotiations with the companies for rights to stream music from the cloud.

* Prince will play a 21-night residency in Los Angeles, starting this Thursday, April 14th at the Forum in Inglewood (where the Lakers used to play). The next shows will be April 21st and 22nd; the rest have yet to be announced. Tickets for the shows went on sale this morning. It's unclear where the rest of the Prince concerts will be; info on dates and locations are being made public on short notice. But here's a nice, fan-friendly twist to Prince's "21 Nite Stand": supposedly close to 85% of the tickets will go for $25, including fees.

* Bob Mould autobiography coming: I didn't know that the Minneapolis rock icon was working on a memoir, but someone mentioned it on Twitter today and there it was on Amazon.com: "See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody"comes out on June 15th and is available for pre-order. From the description (which I'm guessing comes from the publisher):

For the first time, Mould tells his dramatic story, opening up to describe life inside that furnace and beyond. Revealing the struggles with his own homosexuality, the complexities of his intimate relationships, as well as his own drug and alcohol addiction, Mould takes us on a whirlwind ride through achieving sobriety, his acclaimed solo career, creating the hit band Sugar, a surprising detour into the world of pro wrestling, and most of all, finally finding his place in the world.

That's definitely a book I'll want to read.

Amazon Launches its Cloud Media Player, Beating Apple and Google

Amazon.com last week launched its cloud media player and storage locker, beating Apple and Google to the punch. Once you upload music to your Cloud Drive or "locker" (or buy it from Amazon), you can play it on your computer or other device. The Amazon Cloud Player works on all Web browsers, the company says, and can also be used on Android mobile phones or tablets by downloading an application.

The Web version of the cloud player gives you get 5GB of storage space free, and if you buy one MP3 album from the company, you immediately get upgraded to 20GB (which you'd otherwise have to pay for).

Note: Amazon calls the 20GB upgrade with an album purchase a one-year "trial;" in other words, if you load up your "locker" with more than 5GB of media, a year from now you'll have to pay to keep all that stuff there, or pay for an upgrade. Unless of course Amazon decides to make 20GB the normal limit for free storage. Or maybe they'll extend your "trial" if you keep buying MP3 albums from them; it's not clear.

Apple has been said to be working on a cloud music service based on its existing MobileMe platform, which now charges $99 for 20GB of storage, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. As the article points out, Amazon could have a good competitive advantage by being first: once users start uploading their music or movies to a cloud-based system, they'll probably tend to stick with that one.

I signed up for the Amazon Cloud Player the day it went live, though I can't really say I've given it a test run. I haven't tried uploading any music from my computer, though I have bought some singles and one MP3 album from Amazon since then, which I have downloaded to my computer as before; they are automatically stored in my "cloud" as well. It's pretty easy to use and intuitive, as you'd expect from Amazon.

One potential dark cloud (sorry!) for Amazon's new service: it may run afoul of record companies since it hasn't secured additional licenses for the streaming, says an article in Wired. "If the record labels don’t come to a licensing agreement with Amazon soon, they will either be forced to take legal action or implicitly allow other music companies to ditch cloud licenses too," the website says.